Wealth & Money Quote by Jeffrey Bernard

Leave it to Jeffrey Bernard to turn a campus tour into a pub argument about who deserves to exist on the public dime. The line works because it braids three of his signature moves: barbed class commentary, misogyny deployed as comedy, and a feigned helplessness in the face of modernity. He isn’t really mad about Oxford; he’s mad about the idea of a prestigious institution being used as a holding pen - especially by someone he positions as frivolous, sheltered, and female.

The “something to do” detail is the payload. Bernard frames higher education not as intellectual formation but as expensive leisure, a finishing-school detour on the way to the “real” destination: marriage. That’s not just a jab at one unnamed woman; it’s a broader sneer at social reproduction, at the way elite credentials can function as cultural jewelry rather than vocational necessity. His outrage is carefully routed through taxation: the income taxpayer as the put-upon adult forced to subsidize the idle choices of others. It’s a populist pose, but also a self-portrait of grievance.

The subtext is more revealing than the complaint. Bernard’s disdain lands on “girls,” not students, shrinking women into a category that’s easier to dismiss. The joke relies on a caricature - the bright young thing coasting through Oxford before domesticity - that both flatters and polices class privilege. In late-20th-century Britain, as universities expanded and gender roles were being renegotiated, Bernard treats that shift as farce. The cruelty is part of the charm, and the charm is how the cruelty sneaks past the reader’s defenses.